January Playlist Highlights

It’s common for people to set new goals for themselves at this time of year, which would explain why most gyms are really busy in the first few weeks of January.  That said, I think the practice of setting New Year’s resolutions is losing popularity because people often don’t keep the resolutions they set (see gym comment above).  For this reason I usually keep my resolutions to myself: if they don’t work out (no pun intended) no one knows but me.  However, I will share my 2012 goal with you in the off chance it will help you to expand your enjoyment of Latin music.  For 2012 I have resolved to be able to communicate fluently in Spanish by the end of the year.  I suspect some of you have a similar goal to my own and if not you may still find the language learning tricks or ‘hacks’ that have been recommended to me useful for increasing the amount of Latin music you listen to.

1) Listen to music in the language you want to learn.  That’s simple enough as I happen to listen to a lot of Spanish music.  However, my experience is that singing and speaking are a little different (I find some English lyrics hard to understand let alone Spanish ones).  On its own this hack is of limited use.

2) Listen to podcasts in the language you want to learn.  This is a little more useful.  However, if you search iTunes using the word “Spanish” chances are you will find a bunch ‘Learn Spanish…” type podcasts.  That’s fine if you are just starting to learn the language.  I am a little further along than that, which is where language learning hack number three comes into play.

3) If you are an iTunes user you will notice at the bottom of the main page of the iTunes Store a little flag of the country that your iTunes account is set up for (most likely Canada ).  Clicking on this flag will allow you to change it to a Spanish speaking country like Colombia  and you are then presented with the iTunes Store for that country.  This makes it much easier to find Spanish podcasts.  As a bonus you will find more Latin music displayed on the main page of the iTunes Store (though there will still be a surprising amount of main stream English music).

Combining all the above hacks has resulted in me subscribing to a few Latin music podcasts in Spanish, which I listed below.

[list style=”gear”]

• Top Latino: covers the top songs in the Latin world.  The dialog between songs is in Spanish but many of the songs are not.
• El Grito de la Salsa: produced in Guatemala, this podcast is dedicated to spreading Salsa around the world. The podcast is okay with episodes containing a fair bit of Salsa music.
• La Salsa No Existe: the best Latin music podcast that I have come across so far.  Every episode covers a music topic where the host uses song samples to highlight whatever topic he is discussing.  I highly recommend this one.

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Questions, comments, requests?  Send me an email.

Buena suerte with all that you do in 2012